Memory's Burden
by Lady of the Phoenix
Summary: Alearustuck Sidestory. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. A pretty sentiment, filled with reassurance and intending to remind growing children that words have no power to them. Too bad the whole thing was wrong.


Author's Notes: Someone suggested I work with Rose or Roxy next, and so in a way I work with both, but mostly this is how Rose remembers, and the troubles that come with being a Light aspect awakening on Alearus. Also... I never meant to ship what I think I just shipped. Oops.

Memory's Burdens

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

A pretty sentiment, filled with reassurance and intending to remind growing children that words have no power to them. Too bad the whole thing was wrong. Well, not the _whole_ thing of course; it was quite true that sticks and stones had a definite potential to inflict physical damage, whether used toward that end or just by their very presence to someone's detriment. No, it was the part about words that was inherently faulty. The way the saying was crafted implied that words had no power. That they could not stay with you and cut as deeply as a well thrown stone, The problem was there were no salves to put on a bruised ego, no bandages for the poorly crafted and yet still cutting things that children would say to each other. Worse, the saying only served to encourage the intelligent bully. Sticks and stones will get you in trouble with the authority figures placed in charge of you. Words, though, those were discrete, could be private, and cut to the quick with no way to be proven. The wounds they left were inside, where no one else could see.

Chances were she knew that better than most. Ever since she was only a child words had been flung at her, stuck to her, defined her despite her best efforts.

When she moved more rapidly than was strictly proper from her first coherent words as a child to full flung and properly constructed sentences in a month they called her a precocious. When she was four and her mother handed her a violin and she immediately played a haunting refrain that had come to her mind, they called her a prodigy. When she started school and her teachers suggested transferring her to a private schoolstem in a class two years higher they called her a genius. When on her first day of middlingschool she saw what she swore was a familiar face in the hall and called out to the jadeblooded troll by name the other girls in the hall whispered that she was that freak, and hauled Kanaya away.

It wasn't her fault, of course; it never had been. Sadly, it had taken Rose almost until she was eight to realize all of that. Not that it made it any easier. She could still remember the look on her mother's face when her Venerable Aunt Rosalind had brought home a kitten for her cousin Roxy. It had been a sweet little thing, a soft grey with faint tabby markings, white paws, and a little white bib. Roxy, instantly smitten with the thing, had named her Fefeta, and Rose's heart had skipped a beat. She must have been looking at her cousin strangely because her mother had come home the next evening with a kitten for her as well, an orange tabby, and sipped her martini, completely nonchalant, and yet hanging on Rose's every action as she watched the kitten. Rose hadn't had the heart to tell her that the kitten should have been black with a pink nose and how she would have named it Jaspers. Instead she had dubbed the kitten Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer and knitted the kitten a little robe and scarf in her free time between tutors and violin lessons and all sorts of other things her mother did to bring them 'closer together.' Her Mom thought it was adorable, and Rose never told her about the little knit staff that screamed dark wizard. Roxanne already had too much of a wizard kick as it was, and she didn't want to encourage her mother to look too deeply into it.

Really, though, it hit her when she was sitting on the edge of Roxy's bed after her sister-cousin's birthday, watching Roxy playing a new video game she had just received. Rose had perched there, watching, studying and planning out her own playthrough of the game when Roxy handed it over in about a week, and realized that she knew what was going to happen next. For the whole series of plot dialog, she found herself mumbling what would be said next under her breath. Each line she guessed flawlessly worried her more, lifted her voice, until finally Roxy had looked up from the game and was staring at her, her eyes wide in disbelief.

"Rose?" she had asked in concern, putting the controller aside. "Are you..."

"I remember," Rose had answered, knowing that while she couldn't understand it, the only word she had to describe the weird situation was that she had remembered what would happen next. A brand new game, just off the shelf, right out of the package, first play through, and she _remembered_.

"Rose, I'm a little scared right now," her newly eight year old sister-cousin—and something more—said, frowning pretty hard. Fefeta had apparently sensed her mistress's unease, because the cat had appeared almost magically from her hiding place under the bed and curled up promptly in Roxy's lap. Rose watched the display and was certain that the name was wrong because that cat was most decidedly not the same color as her own eyes.

"Me too," Rose admitted. "I... Just remembered what was going to happen next."

Roxy, ever the adventurous one of the two of them, had set the game aside and tried to comfort her, and when that had failed, had scampered off to help Rose test her new-found precognition. They spent that night up way past their bed times, well past the points when both of their mothers had popped their heads in and turned the lights off in the room in a standard display of passive-aggression, and long past when they heard the evening argument between their mothers end. Roxy grabbed every book she knew Rose hadn't read yet off her bookshelves and quizzed her on the contents. Most of the books written by trolls Rose couldn't answer questions regarding, as well as some of Roxy's sillier stuff about cats or her books regarding her budding interest in computers, but all those Rose had always meant to read she found herself answering detailed questions about.

Nor did her knowledge stop there. They shared most of the same classes at schoolstem, and Rose found herself telling Roxy the answers to questions before the teachers even asked them. They always felt like the right ones, like the questions that a teacher would ask, or should ask. Some she could have sworn she remembered answering, others she couldn't explain. Every day for a month continued with them testing just where Rose's limits were, only to find that there were far less limits than either of them had expected.

Then they started. The dreams. Every night, every nap, every time she accidentally nodded off in class because the teacher was covering some section of a book she had already read and didn't care about hearing what felt like for the hundredth time. She dreamt of an overly ironic young man from Texas who was a little too interested in hiding his emotions behind gratuitous rapping and had died at her side in an explosion of green. Another young man, as different from the first as day and night, for this one was open and intentionally funny and so innocent that it was actually hard to believe. A girl her age as well, confused and yet cheerful beyond belief, who didn't know what a TV dinner was, but who could solve high level mathematical problems in her head without taking more than a minute to think. Dreams of a stairway, dark like the corridor it interrupted, lit by the glow of the skin of a troll who stood there as Rose pressed her clumsy drunken lips against in a kiss that was both chaste and absolutely possessive.

When she started to shudder at the word 'English,' shy away from the billards room where her mother entertained fellow scientists in a smoky haze, and linger longer online than she used to, tunneling through hundreds of forums in search of just a few familiar names, her mother started to worry. She could tell in the way the passive became just a little more aggressive. Even her Venerable Aunt Rosalind seemed to notice, and approached her one night to talk. Rose, far from ready to confront the person that she now realized this woman had to be, just blandly recited the exact speech she was certain she would come up with in the same situation, and was almost amused to see the woman flustered, for all that she strode off confidently. Worse, Rose even found herself pulling away from Roxy, because the first time she mentioned a dream she had that Roxy had figured into she had just gotten a weird look and a compliment for her subconscious's creativity.

She had no where to turn to, no one to talk to, and the person she was closest to in the world saw it all as some kind of neat parlor trick. Of course Roxy was the only one who was amused, even delighted by the whole thing. The girls at school who were already hard and cruel only got worse when Rose kept, unintentionally, showing them up. The worst had been when Rose had gotten her mother to take her out to get new clothes and had found herself returning with a range of blacks and purples that had never had their place in her things before, but had been so comfortable and comforting that she couldn't pass them up (truth was there was a set of orange pajamas too but she never showed those to anyone other than Roxy). The girls at school had gone a whole new direction with their taunts and insults, and they had managed more than once to pick up a new insult that Rose hadn't been able to predict.

It happened in middlingschool, a few months in when the endzoneball team was doing well and Roxy had dragged her along to a game so she could flirt with a guy she had developed a crush on. Rose had been left sitting alone in a relatively empty corner of the bleachers—who really cared about middlingschool sports anyway?—watching something she could hardly care less about with her eyes, and turning her mind all the while to processing one of the latest dreams. This one had involved sitting on a chunk of stone in a bubble contained in a vast emptiness. The stone had been floating above a ruined battlefield, and before her the young prankster she frequently dreamt of hung in the air, clad in blue, with a giant technicolor hammer in his hands as he battled a giant, anthropomorphic, winged black dog with one arm, one eye, and a deadly looking sword in his hand. Bec Noir. Something in her mind remembered the name Bec Noir, and it send the worst kinds of chills down her spine, as if someone had metaphorically walked over her grave.

"He's one of my least favorite memories, too."

Rose flinched out of her dream-slash-recollection and immediately turned to look for the source of the voice. The face she found was almost familiar, like a name on the tip of her tongue. It was strange, because it wasn't like she was friends with any maroonbloods, much less one with such a cheerful expression, such curling horns, and a worn fedora perched jauntily between them.

"Excuse me?" Rose sputtered out, having grown unfamiliar with being caught off guard.

"Bec Noir," the girl happily provided, returning her attention to the game and cheering as some troll on the opposing team—it couldn't be a human considering the holes cut out of the helmet to account for the horns—carried what Rose couldn't help but call a football into the endzone, netting his team six points. Once the celebration was over the troll returned her attention to Rose and smiled once more. "He was really terrible. Killed all of my robot-mes except the Alpha. Would have killed the me-me too if I hadn't used him to get to the Green Sun to meet you."

Suddenly it was there, as clear and burning hot as the flare off of the Green Sun that had licked at her legs as she had arisen, reborn, from the swirling fury of the baleful orb. Aradia Megido, the Maid of Time. She and half of Sollux had awaited them as she and her ecto-brother had arisen to new life. Or maybe not life so much as divinity. She had been the one to suggest a corpse party to celebrate their dead when the meteor had arrived, and who had left with the half-Sollux when they fled through the impenetrable mess of the Veil to follow the light of the Green Sun.

All of the words, concepts, knowledge poured into her suddenly, rushing to fill in the gaps she hadn't realized were present. It all made sense. Her whole life had been the fall-out of being the Seer of Light, one of this world's goddesses of knowledge and luck. Alearus was what they had created, their refuge free from the taint of Lord English. She had been the one that had suggested meeting again. Finding each other in a little sea-side city that Rose hated to acknowledge was halfway across the country and years away.

"Oh, you didn't have it all yet," Aradia said with a sigh. "Sorry. It's kinda rough when it really gets you. You're going to have a hell of a pan-ache tomorrow when you wake up. Didn't mean to jar it before you were ready, but I was getting kinda bored being the only one who remembered. I've been working on Nepeta for _months _and I can't even get her to remember Equius. Granted her body reacts when I mention him, but not her mind. I guess it's a Heart thing."

For a while Rose let the troll girl rant on as long as she wanted, quickly shuffling all of the new memories into some rough semblance of order in her mind. There wasn't time for anything more substantial than arranging it into sections she mentally labeled as 'pre-Grimdark,' 'Moon Journey,' and 'God Tier,' but it was enough. Somehow she knew just where she would find anything she needed, something she quickly chalked up to her Aspect, apparently still as active in this life as it had been in the last.

"And you? Don't you think you're a bit young to have remembered..."

"Nearly everything," Aradia agreed, nodding. "I think it has to do with being a Time player. There is a lot, an insane amount, that I still can't organize properly because of time-loops—stable and otherwise—but I've been aware of who and what I was for a very long time. I can only expect that the same is true for you as a Light."

"I would be forced to agree," Rose conceded, staring down the stands at where her 'sister-cousin' (and mother when she really thought about it) was caught up in trying to catch the attention of the guy she had come to see down on the sidelines.

"Does she..." Aradia began to ask, and Rose cut her off with a curt shake of her head.

"Not much of anything from what I've been able to determine," Rose admitted sadly. "It's possible that only Light and Time players will awaken so quickly..."

"And Blood," Aradia quickly added with a thoughtful look. "Alternian history indicates that."

"And Blood," Rose agreed before continuing. "Or..."

The look Aradia gave her said everything for Rose. That she knew, or at least guessed, and understood. "Or maybe things won't play out how we wanted them to."

They were silent for a while longer, both of them feigning attention on the match, and probably actually trying to arrange their thoughts. All Rose could wonder was if she was ever going to have someone to really talk to about this. Should she risk asking Roxy? Or was that a lost cause right now? Should she search online for the others who would likely have the chance to more easily recover their memories? Dave, she knew, would be a useful person to seek out. Not only would he remember more easily if Aradia was right in her assertions, but they shared more memories together than any other individual she knew, and it might be easier to get through this with him. What was the troll concept she was looking for? Moirails? Could she and Dave hold that relationship until they figured out how to cope?

"Oh, it looks like I'm needed over there," Aradia announced almost suddenly, leaping from her bleachers seat. "I'm part of my middlingschool's yearbook, so I have to take pictures. Our adviser sent me, and it looks like the guy who had the camera is finally here to drop it off."

"Wait!" Rose couldn't help but say, reaching after Aradia. Of course once she said it and Aradia turned to look at her she regretted it. Aradia turned to look at her, something like pity clear in her eyes.

Maybe Aradia knew she'd seen it, maybe she'd read some kind of awareness in Rose's own expression. No matter what it was Aradia pulled a notepad from her pocket, pulled out a pen and quickly jotted a few things down. Soon the torn piece of paper was in Rose's hand and Aradia was waving as she ran off.

Rose was left to look down at the paper, to take in the series of digits and the Trollchum handle, and the series of symbols that followed them. Diamond, gear, sun, question mark. It didn't take a genius to decipher it. Or at least it took someone who had more awareness of the world than most individuals possessed.

_Maybe_, she thought to herself with a faint smile as she slipped the paper into a pocket. _Maybe, for a time, I think we could. For as long as we need. Right, Aradia?_


End file.
